Every child is homeschooled. 

"Collaborating with a 4-year Old"

If children spend most of their childhood in school, they will become institutionalized. School is an institution, like it or not. To suggest children can spend 6 hours a day, every weekday for the majority of their lives, in school and not become institutionalized borders on magical thinking. It simply follows that committing to an institution is going to result in institutionalization. 

Saying this to school parents gets a very chilly response. I don't know why. If you choose an institution, aren't you asking for institutionalization? Is that not the goal? That is, in fact, what schools are paid to do and they do a great a job of it. Harm isn't implied, but cultural norms are created. We don't notice institutionalization so much when we are all equally steeped. But that doesn't mean it isn't happening. 

Profound institutionalization won't be true for every schooled child, of course. Parents who put their kids in school, but who maintain authority above the school system, seem to raise kids sheltered from the darker side of the lessons schools teach. Every child is homeschooled, after all. And homeschool is its own form of indoctrination. I think one important difference is that home indoctrinates love first and on a fairly consistent continuum. 

Love is antithetical to abandonment. A lot of children never get over this earliest of cultural dichotomies, when their parents hand them over, body and soul, to bureaucracy. We all love our kids. Be that as it may, commitment to an institution is going to result in institutionalization, in a fairly consistent way. I've known parents so dedicated to the institution of school, so institutionalized themselves, so full of the Koolaid, they bring it home, even into homeschooling. That's just sad. 

"School is a prison--and damaging our kids" ~Peter Gray

"Most people assume that the basic design of schools, as we know them today, emerged from scientific evidence about how children learn best. But, in fact, nothing could be further from the truth...Schools as we know them today are a product of history, not of research into how children learn."

 I realize this is perfectly obvious to everyone else. But I'm still quite stunned by the suddenness of it. 

 There are no babies here. There really aren't even any children here. 

The ballroom dancing class has morphed into a quarterly event. The whole thing has just been so dang awesomely cool, I can hardly tell you. Watching theses young ladies and gentlemen unwind the formality and reconfigure it to modern times, seeing them lose themselves in the structure to discover something casual, artistic, and fun. Watching them have fun! Its the best. I love to see them have fun!

 And that dress, y'all? $3.50 at the thrift shop! Oh yeah!

My husband designs learning spaces professionally. So its kind of funny, how long it took us to reconsider and reconfigure our dining room. We've held it separate and clung to the myth of family dinners there for 7 years. But its most used as creative space. Even after I decided to officially creatify the area, it still took me another week to turn to my husband and ask him for advice.

The first thing I noticed, after manifesting official creative space, is that artists are private. We all like to have our work out, in process. But no one wants to answer questions about it. Everyone, I think almost universally, wants the time and space to do what they want to do without being pestered by questions or even by too much observation. (Varied levels of gaze and observation may be one of the most stifling things about institutional school.)

So I've got a drawing going. My daughter has a skirt going. My husband is writing music in there, hooking up his looper to the amp in the corner. Musicians gather in there and move furniture around. This is all good. But it requires a certain amount of grace and good manners to share creative space. People who understand the growth of buildings (did you know buildings have their own life and growth?) can look at what is happening in the room and see a need for different kinds of furniture. And a need to organize all the stuff in a way to enhance feelings of both privacy and collaboration.

Editing would help. Writing then rewriting drafts would help. Admitting the problem is the first step. There is some powerfully bad writing on this and my old blog. There. I have seen it and I said it.

The quality of the writing has never been the point. Showing up. Noticing. Being available.
These are the points.

 The space is working its magic.